Citizen reaction to local government publishing their
records online is consistently unfavorable. . .

Reader's Letter - Lisa Ramsey

To all the county clerks of Texas –

It is unfortunate that county clerks remain clueless
to the harm they have caused the very citizens who have voted them into
office to “protect and preserve” their records. A comment that, “it was a
good business decision” is not the reason the citizens put the county clerks
in office. The first and foremost criteria in any government office that is
the keeper of records is to protect those records and the sensitive
information therein.

Rendering the documents the citizens in the county
entrusted to the county clerk assessable to anyone in the world isn’t what
the citizens asked for. Ask the couple who owned property in Denton
County. After they moved out for a work-related transfer and left the house
vacant, the house was stolen. Click, click – in a matter of seconds their
signature and driver’s license number were stolen. A warranty deed forged.
The Denton County investigator attributed the entire theft transaction on
access to online Public Records.

You cannot ask Amy Boyer, the women who was stalked
by Liam Youens – she is dead – how did he find her? He found her in the
records the counties published online. You can find these statements in the
police reports covering the crime. A judge has allowed the data information
company providing this sensitive information to be sued for negligence.
Helen Remsburg, Administratrix of the Estate of Amy Lynn Boyer v. Docusearch
Inc., No. 2002-255 (D.N.H.). The information provided by this data
information company was no more than what county clerks are posting on the
internet - name, address and social security number.

Why would Judges be ordering their names removed and
all documentation if it posed no threat to the security of the American
people? The families of federal judges have been murdered in their homes.

You can also ask the victims to mortgage fraud – a
scheme performed across the country by two individuals. Abstractors
nationwide compiled evidence of records and forwarded them to the FBI
resulting in indictments and convictions. I am one of those abstracting
companies. In every one of my online counties, I found these victims. In
every one of my off-line counties, I found no victims. Do you see a
correlation?

How can you say birth records are sealed for 75 years
in Texas, when you choose to display the divorce papers filed in the real
property records online? Grayson county lists current births, their name,
parents name and date of birth. How is that so? Identity thieves don’t
need copies of the actual documents to utilize this information in forming
an identity.

Records have very sensitive information – driver’s
licenses, social security numbers, children’s names and dates of birth. No
one wants the entire world to see their sensitive information. Numbers all
housed in the real property records in filed divorce decrees, powers of
attorney, liens, mortgages, leases and probates. Virtually every document
filed contains some type of sensitive information.

My plans were not for terrorists to locate my local
water easements, utility easements and towers, etc. so my city becomes their
next target. Recovered notes of Al Quaeda revealed targeted sites through
online records. Work is being farmed overseas to India and viewed by
terrorists – our records, bought, sold and packaged to foreign countries.
Red stamped, “Here we Are, Please Harm Us!” This is all the information you
need to strike again!

One Indian firm boasts searching the “public” records
of 400 American counties to produce 30,000 reports a month. Do you like
knowing they are doing your title searches without the knowledge of any of
your individual state laws and regulations that govern these searches?

The psychiatric nurse in Alaska who is suing to remove
her sensitive information doesn’t want her records online. Online records
pose a very high security risk to her safety. Would you want to be a
psychiatric nurse with today’s ability to access personal information?

If you want a really strong opinion, from a really
strong citizen of the United States, let me quote Judge Robert H. Alsdorf,
King County Superior Court of Washington. I could not extend you the same
message with such form and grace as he does:

“It is hard to conceive a broader invasion of
privacy than freely disseminating the information to the entire world and
rendering it instantaneously accessible to all”

All kinds of issues revolve around online records –
not just the fraud, the identity theft, and the security of one’s identity.
County clerks promoting to companies and the general public a purported ease
in performing a title search has resulted in research by unqualified and
untrained personnel. Experienced and trained abstractors have actually
somewhat protected the county from suits by knowing different abbreviations,
often not legal abbreviations used in indexing, the art of cross-referencing
different ways in almost every county. Untrained personnel are missing
judgments, tax liens and mortgages. Two local attorneys hired me to find
out if there was a property sale after their abstracts of judgments were
placed on file, one out of Dallas County and one out of Collin County,
Texas. Both resulted in the missed Abstracts of Judgment – local attorneys
were harmed.

One of the hardest comments for me to digest was made
by a county clerk that provided the “rationale” of the sale of records
cheaply to a title company. Stated was the substantial amount of business
received. Title companies don’t provide business to the counties. The
citizens provide business and revenue to the county by carrying out their
daily lives and businesses. The citizens are the ones paying for the
documents to be recorded and the records to be maintained.

To add insult to injury, these companies who have
imaged our documents have decided they own them and are
selling them for profit. The counties are losing major revenue. I want the
revenue for these images to remain in my county, to keep my county running,
and to keep my county taxes down. I am one abstractor, out of hundreds of
abstractors, that used to write checks for large sums of money every day.
The money went to my county for the preservation of my county’s records.
There is no comparison to the lost revenue vs. any savings any county is
reaping today.

Going online was just an easy way out. We won’t use
our intelligence to make our county office run smoother and more efficient –
we will just violate our citizen’s privacy and put it online? The
protection of our lives and property should never be thought of as a
business decision. Perhaps a good business decision would be to keep local
research businesses, local attorneys, and local title companies in business
instead of putting them out of business – hurting the local economy.
Perhaps a good business decision would have been to keep records off-line so
that properly trained personnel would be doing your real estate transactions
instead of make-shift thin title plants using low wage employees resulting
in multiple claims of missed liens, judgments and mortgages, all hurting the
citizens you swore to protect. Perhaps a good business decision would be to
retain rights of ownership of the documents to the county preserved for the
citizens thereby making any kind of resale for profit by companies
purchasing bulk documentation forbidden thereby protecting their sensitive
information by internet stalkers.

There is security in records being maintained just in
the county clerk’s office and not online. All of us who frequent the county
clerk’s office are private investigators, abstractors, and title company
employees. The county clerks know who we are and why we are there. They
would have watched and questioned the men who sought to commit mortgage
fraud – they would have noticed the red in all the black dots. The stalker
who killed the woman who he was obsessed with wouldn’t have had time to
drive across the state to track her down. She would have had a much better
chance of being alive today. Perhaps the county clerks are unaware of the
citizen upheaval that is currently forming.

Lawsuits have happened and will continue. People will
win and the taxpayers will be the losers. Losers in revenues lost to court
battles. Revenues that could have been used to enhance our community, not
tear it down. Instead of asking the title companies who are farming out our
documents to foreign countries, and making claims to our images for their
own profit at the cost of county revenues, maybe you should have asked your
local citizens first.

While I cannot be the conscience of another person, or
another “business” entity, I do know that if I was a county clerk that put
records online, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. So much harm has been
caused by so called “business decisions.” I am not a business decision.
The other citizens of my county are not business decisions. We are real
people, with real assets and real identities who deserve to be protected by
the people who took the oath of office and swore to protect our sensitive
information.

I guess the real question is, how many more deaths
have to occur, how many more identities have to be stolen, and how many more
9-11s do we have to have? Someone please tell me how much harm do we have
to suffer before our government officials use their intelligence?